Trump Moves Back to the Issues!

Aug 11, 2015

RUSH: Right on schedule, Donald Trump moves back to the issues, ladies and gentlemen. A very humble forecast, prognostication, suggestion made by me, your beloved host, exactly 24 hours ago right here behind the Golden EIB Microphone. I’ll tell you something else happening out there. The Drive-By Media is starting to change its take on Trump. All of a sudden, he’s intelligent. All of a sudden, he knows what he’s doing. All of a sudden, he’s not this mind-blown oddball that nobody can figure out.

All of a sudden, Trump has a strategy.

The Drive-Bys are adapting here, ladies and gentlemen.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Your host continues as show prep for the media. Audio sound bite number one, back to NPR’s Morning Edition, talking about Trump and criticism of his treatment by the moderators at the Thursday night debate.

DAVID FOLKENFLIK: Some conservatives, such as Rush Limbaugh, joined Trump’s denunciation of what he said was political correctness, and Fox reportedly fielded many complaints from Trump’s supporters. John Sides is a political science professor at George Washington University. He says the questions for Trump had a paradoxical result.

RUSH: That’s all the… Eh eh eh! Any more of that, people are gonna fall asleep. I just wanted to let you know that. And then there is this last night, Anderson Cooper 360, Jeffrey Lord — former Reagan administration political director, now with NewsBusters and the American Spectator — was interviewed by Anderson Cooper. He said, “Hey, Jeff. What does it say that Roger Stone, certainly no shrinking violet and legendary for provocative tactics in Republican circles, has parted ways with the Trump campaign, however it may have happened?”

LORD: I noticed today that Rush Limbaugh on his show was saying in essence the same thing. I think he used the term “free advice” or something of that nature to Donald Trump to move on and get back to the ones who brung you, which in Rush’s case I think he was talking about immigration and some of these other issues.

RUSH: Roger Stone (we talked about him yesterday) claims he got out of the Trump campaign because Trump had veered away from issues and getting into this personality stuff. Trump said (summarized), “Nah, he didn’t quit. I fired him. He’s a loser. He wasn’t doing anything I found worthwhile.” Doesn’t matter how it happened. Anyway, Trump is back now, he’s talking about immigration again, and he is talking about how it’s time we got the oil of Iraq and any of these other Middle Eastern countries that we have saved and defended and protected.

As I say, his polling numbers continue to just balloon, shocking all of the experts in the establishment.

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RUSH: On the cutting edge of societal evolution, Rush Limbaugh, a man, a legend, a way of life. Learn it, love it, live it. Some stories on polling data. First from Breitbart: Republican frontrunner billionaire Donald Trump has jumped seven points — a remarkable hike in the polls — after the GOP debate in Cleveland, Ohio, last week…. The Morning Consult poll,” which I’ve never heard of. Well, that doesn’t matter. Well, that doesn’t matter. I’m just telling you, I’ve never heard of it.

I’m not saying it’s not worth it. I just never heard of ’em. “The Morning Consult poll of 746 self-identified Republicans and GOP-leaning independents has Trump with a commanding lead over the entire rest of the field at 32%. That means he leads the next three candidates — former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Dr. Ben Carson and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker or Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) — combined. Bush, who came in second, got only 11%. Carson came in third with 9%.

“Walker and Rubio tied with 6% each. … Trump’s 32% is also up seven points over last week’s Morning Consult poll, which had him at 25%. The poll was conducted Aug. 7 through Aug. 9 — Friday through Sunday — which means most of the polling was done not just after [the debate] but also after Friday evening comments about [Megyn] Kelly. … What’s more, Trump’s favorability ratings in this new poll skyrocketed.

“‘The share of Republican primary voters who say they view Trump favorably increased since the last tracking poll, to 62% from 57%. But the number of registered voters who say they see Trump unfavorably remains high — 52% of all voters say they see him in a negative light.'” From TheHill.com: “A plurality of college students think billionaire businessman Donald Trump won the first Republican presidential debate, according to a poll released Monday.

“Twenty-six percent of college or college-bound students said Trump won the debate, according to a survey from Chegg, an online textbook rental and tutoring company. Sixteen percent said former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush won, 14% thought Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) won and 10% went for Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). Ten percent of college students said nobody won. Amongst just Republicans alone, 26% of those surveyed think Trump should be taken seriously as a candidate; versus just 8% of college Democrats.

“Also worth noting: 40% of college students want vice president Joe Biden to enter the race to challenge … Hillary Clinton,” which continues here to buttress my newly evolved theorem to explain the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, and it is that he’s not the phenomenon, and it is that Obama was not the phenomenon. Although, look: I’m not saying that Obama did not have special powers and did not have a special attraction to some people in the ’08 campaign.

Don’t misunderstand me here. I see the speech that Berlin with half million people supposedly there and the Styrofoam Greek columns. You know, I’m not denying all that happened. I’m just telling you this is second campaign in a row where the first candidate other than Hillary is drawing record crowds and supposedly shocking and stunning everybody. This is just more evidence that there’s something to that theorem when in this poll 40% of college students want Biden to get in ’cause they don’t want Hillary.

Now, it’s not that they’re satisfied with Bernie Sanders. These are college kids. Bernie Sanders is their great-grandfather. That’s why. That’d be my guess. In another polling data story, this from Reuters, the Reuters/Ipsos poll: “There is no sign that Donald Trump’s raucous first presidential debate is hurting his support among party voters, with the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll showing he still has a big lead over his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination.

“Trump’s staying power is defying predictions of political doom and leading some Republicans to explore ways to persuade him not to pursue a third-party bid…” The latest on that is he’s keeping the option open. He’s saying (paraphrased), “Look, if they’re gonna actively come after me — if they’re not gonna help me, if they’re going to come out and try to harm me — why should I pledge that I will not run third-party while they try to take me out?” That’s his theory.

That line of reasoning will resonate well with his supporters. The latest the Drive-Bys are trying to figure out now? Because this is all new to them, everything happening here, as I have previously noted, is outside the boundaries of every bit of conventional wisdom the political class and the elites understand. Trump should have been gone three weeks ago. He should have been humiliated out of the race. He should have had apologized, begged for forgiveness, walked away, and promised never to be heard from again.

That’s how egregious what he did was, talking about the kind of immigrants coming in from Mexico, and then insulting McCain by saying, “I don’t really like people that get captured. I admire people that don’t.” Well, the establishment thought, “That’s the end of Trump.” It wasn’t the end of Trump. It turns out he gained approval in polling data after those remarks. And then I’ll tell you what the standard thinking is after the debate on Thursday.

Within the confines of The Political Establishment (with a capital T, capital P, capital E), within the confines of the ruling political class in Washington, they think that Trump performed dismally. They think that that debate performance of Trump was embarrassing, that it was bad, that it was unfocused. They think that Trump came off as totally unprepared, that he wasn’t even taking it seriously, that he wasn’t ready for anything that came his way.

They think anybody else would have been judged that way, and the next poll would have shown him losing over half of his support. When that didn’t happen, the inside-the-Beltway political class establishment began to panic even more than they had been panicking up to then. And then in that aftermath, as it continued, where Trump did not say one word for three days about an issue, when Trump for three days was doubling down on his criticisms and his insults?

I guarantee you that inside the establishment they finally were rubbing their hands together in glee and say, he’s self-destructing. And now we find out not only has he not self-destructed, his support is growing. And I’m telling you, they don’t understand why. The reason they don’t understand why is because they do not understand the mood of their own voters, and they haven’t understood that for years. They do not understand the rage, they do not the anger, they do not understand the frustration.

Amazingly.

I mean, I think if anybody here appears to be out of touch politically and veering away from the political mainstream, it happens to be the political establishment. To not even know or to not even factor… Let’s say if they know it and they don’t factor it into their behavior and into their approach. I firmly believe that close to a majority of people who vote in this country have been aghast at what has happened since the first days of the stimulus.

I think minimum half the people of this country have been pulling their hair out, have been frustrated, have been angry, are scared, a combination of all these things, as every new Obama policy is implemented. And while all that’s happened, there has not been a serious effort to counter it. Adding to the anger and frustration, there hasn’t been a serious effort to even voice opposition to it. It’s assumed that the Republicans opposing it or voicing opposition are insincere, that they are simply patronizing their voters.

But they don’t see — the voters don’t see — any real substantive action to stop any of this, and the people I’m talking about (minimum half the population) think the country is being fundamentally transformed in ways that it was never intended as founded, in ways that are dooming their children and grandchildren’s futures, that are forever changing the relationship citizen to government. We are spending money we don’t have.

The country is literally being torn apart, dismantled, and put together in ways people don’t want, for the last seven years, and there hasn’t been a single serious effort to stop it. And in the midst of all that, here comes Trump. And they claim still not to understand this. They claim, in the establishment, still to believe that what Trump’s doing is gonna lead to an implosion. What’s more likely to happen is it’s gonna lead to copycats.

And other people are going to start figuring out what it is that Trump’s doing that is achieving this popularity, above and beyond celebrity personality, and they’re gonna eventually figure out that there is substance to this, even though they don’t see it. And it’s all because they don’t know their own… You know, I use the term “audience,” but it’s the same thing. They don’t know their base voters. Let me add one thing to this.

In addition to all of this, they have insulted their base voters time and time again during these last seven years. And the most recent egregious example is McCain calling them “crazies” at a Trump rally in Arizona.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I just got a very clever e-mail that is forcing me to think about something. The e-mailer (I’m paraphrasing it here) reminded me that I’m on record as often saying that polls this far out are meaningless and that I don’t pay any attention to ’em. “So why are you hyping all this Trump polling data, Rush? You yourself have said that you don’t start paying attention to polls until you get down to the summertime of the actual campaign year.” It’s a good question.

I find myself getting caught up in this stuff, and I think the reason is that we’ve not seen it before. And I can’t emphasize that enough. By everything that’s happened in this world of politics, within our lifetimes — I mean, let’s be honest, folks — Donald Trump should have been gone I don’t know how many times from this race, but he’s not. And we’ve not seen this before. Nobody has. I mean, we’ve seen candidates like this before. Not as good. Not as charismatic.

But they have fallen by the wayside very quickly. In practically every previous campaign, if somebody was not obviously a professional politician, once that was spotted, they were finished. They were not taken seriously and they were gone. And they didn’t get very far anyway. Well, that’s another rule that’s been broken here. Trump is by no means a professional politician. In fact, you know what he admitted to the…? Let me find a sound bite here.

Trump got back on the issues. Start here at number six. Trump got back on the issues today. He’s now taken a break from responding to attacks, hitting back, personally attacking people. He’s back to the issues, but it’s the second sound bite I have coming up here that is also indicative of how we’ve not seen this before. The first is from Fox & Friends this morning. Steve Doocy said, “ISIS is a problem abroad and a problem here at home. You have made clear that you would use force to go after them. Are we talking boots on the ground?”

TRUMP: I say this: I didn’t want to go there in the first place, but now we take the oil. We should have kept the oil. Now we go in, we knock the hell out of ’em, take the oil; we thereby take their wealth. They have so much money, they have better Internet connections than we do in the United States! They’re training our kids through the Internet. We have to knock out their wealth. The other thing, Saudi Arabia and other places, tremendous money is flowing in. We have to stop that flow of money. But take the oil, knock the hell out of them.

RUSH: Now, this has been part of Trump’s repertoire even before he dreamed of getting into any political contest. I mean, years ago, you go back to post-9/11 of 2001, you see Trump on TV and this is his theme. “What are we doing! I mean, going into Iraq. What are we doing leaving them with the oil? Why if it weren’t for us we wouldn’t have a country! We should get first dibs on the oil. Why are we allowing the ChiComs and others to come in and bid on it?”

Of course the answer was, “We’re the big superpower. We have to appear magnanimous. We can’t run around the world conquering things and taking things,” is the attitude. “There’s already enough hatred and disgust for us, so we have to let the little guys have a stab at some wealth.” You know, the leftist argument is that we’ve run around the world and we’ve stolen the wealth that we have. We haven’t really created it.

This is what Obama and his gang believe, that the United States has really just run around the world and co-opted everything. “We’ve stolen the natural resources, the wealth of other nations, and that’s how we’re rich, and it’s not fair,” and so forth. Trump doesn’t buy that, of course, and his thinking is common sense. “Hey, look, if Iraq is in danger of falling and we go in there to save it, and there’s an immense reservoir of oil there, why the hell shouldn’t it be ours?

“We’re the ones that saved it! Why are we giving it away?” This has been a theme of his. So he’s back to this today. Now, tactically he’s doing this with ISIS. Now, it’s one thing to say — and it sounds really good — to go get the oil, but how are you gonna do this? To go get the oil out of Iraq, this is another invasion. And then after you invade the country, you’ve gotta hold it. You don’t just go get the oil. There’s a whole lot of military things you have to do first before you get it.

And then you’ve gotta deal with the UN and all kinds of people. But just on the surface what Trump is saying makes eminent common sense. And, believe me, there are people all of this country who love this country who think attitudes like that are what has been missing. There are nations all over the world ought to be saying “thank you” to us, ought to be offering us some of the oil that we have protected for them.

It ought not even be a question of us having to go in and take it.

Trump comes along and stands up for America. He comes along and stands up for what’s right, people’s view, and so this view is widely accepted. Now, this next bite, CNN. Chris Cuomo says, “Rich Lowry says that youÂ’re ‘the most fabulous whiner in the world.’ And you’ve shown if you were to sit across from Putin, or Mexico or the Middle East leaders, that as soon as they said something you don’t like you would become a whiner and snipe-y,” and you’d start attacking them as losers, “and not get anything done. What do you say to that?”

TRUMP: I am the most fabulous whiner. I do whine, because I want to win. I’m not happy —

CUOMO: Are whiners winners?

TRUMP: — and I’m a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win, and I’m gonna win for the country and I’m gonna make our country great again.

CUOMO: How do you work with government?

TRUMP: Chris, I’ve been better at working with government —

CUOMO: You can’t just come back at everybody when they insult you!

TRUMP: Hey, Chris? I’m worth more than $10 billion!

RUSH: I can do what I want, and what I’ve been doing is working! (laughing) “You can’t just come back at everybody when they insult you!” You know something, there’s a lot tied up in this bite. Number one, can you think of any candidate anywhere, for any office, who admits to being a whiner and turning it into a positive? Can you think of the anybody who has ever tried that?

Number two, you notice Chris Cuomo says, “You just can’t come back at everybody! How are you gonna work with government? You just can’t come back at everybody.” This is something I think the left operates on. I think the left attempts to silence its political opposition by insulting them instantly and making it look like they are whining if they respond to it. I think whether Chris Cuomo knows it or not, it’s a tactic that his side uses to quell opposition, to silence opposition, which is what their objective is.

It’s Obama’s. You know, these people are not interested in a debate. They’re not interested in a free-flow exchange of ideas. They are into eliminating opposition. I would say that that’s Trump’s attitude toward our enemies. (summarized) “Why do I want to get along with ’em? What’s the point of making a deal with them if we’re gonna lose? I want to win! Well, I don’t care to whine about it. I whine to win, Chris Cuomo. You show me any winners who whine?”

I don’t think Trump and these other people are defining “whine” in the same way. A whiner is a helpless complainer. There’s nothing helpless about Trump. Maybe “whine” is not the correct word or whiner to reflect what he does. He just refuses to take insults. He refuses to chalk it up as, “That’s the way the game is played, those are the rules, and you move on.”

If somebody attacks him, by God, they’re gonna hear about it. You can tell, the man’s in love with himself. He’s rich, really rich. “I’ve got over $10 billion! Tell me how I’m losing, Cuomo. Tell me how I’m losing. I got $10 billion!” (laughing) And then the next one, this is back to Chris Cuomo, CNN, Cuomo said, “Smart men aren’t always good to women? What do you mean?”

TRUMP: I’ve always been good to women, and there will nobody be better to women as a president because when I talk about health issues, I will take care of women like nobody else can. Certainly Jeb Bush doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. He admitted that the other day. And, believe me, that will be his 47%. His statement on women’s health issues will take him down. You’ve gotta go with the punches, like the boxers say.

CUOMO: Right.

TRUMP: I mean, you have to get things done.

CUOMO: But you have to have a core set of ideals!

TRUMP: You have to have certain flexibility. You have to get this through and passed through a vast web. We can’t just keep signing executive orders all over the place. I will take care of women’s health issues —

CUOMO: You have to have core principles that people can grab onto and vote for you.

TRUMP: — and guys like Bush — and, by the way, Hillary Clinton won’t. She won’t take care of it like I will.

CUOMO: How can you say Hillary Clinton won’t take care of women’s health the way you will?

TRUMP: Because I know my capability and I think I know her capability, and I’m much more capable than she is.

RUSH: (laughing) Now, before you react to this, I want you to think of something. You’ve seen Trump’s TV shows. A lot of women on those shows, right? A lot of women in management. How many? I don’t know. How many women that have worked for ‘Cuomo’ Trump have sued him? Any? How many discrimination suits have there been against Trump? I can’t think of any. I’m not saying there haven’t been any.

How many women that have worked for Trump have gone public and said, “He doesn’t pay us fairly, he uses us.” To me — I mean, just a casual observer– I think Trump loves women. I think he’s all about women. And I know that he has them in positions of power and authority within his company and his organization. But he just shatters all of these conventional wisdom beliefs. Chris Cuomo: “What do you mean you’d be better than Hillary on women’s issues?”

Chris Cuomo can’t even comprehend that there would be anybody better than Hillary on women’s issues for whatever reason. Here comes Trump claiming that he would be far and away better on women’s issues than Hillary, and Chris Cuomo has no idea what to do with it. It’s such a foreign, foreign concept. Trump says, “Because I’m a more capable person than she is!” We know that the women that work in the Obama administration do indeed get short-changed on salary compared to the men. Don’t we know that about Hillary’s office, too?

Isn’t it true that the women in her Senate office did not make nearly what the men made?